After an Attack, Chinese Won't Print Expatriate's Novel

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: June 24, 2000

BEIJING, June 23—
A major Chinese publisher has canceled its plans to translate and publish the celebrated novel ''Waiting,'' by the Chinese-born emigre Ha Jin, after a harsh attack in a literary review here denouncing the book as an attempt to portray China as backward and repressive.

People involved in book publishing here said they did not believe that official censors had directly ordered government-owned Beijing Publishing Group, whose editors had effusively praised the novel earlier, to drop its plans.

But they said the reversal reflected an increasingly repressive climate over the last year in which some earthy works of fiction as well as many books on politics and history have been banned, causing publishers to fear losing their investments, and perhaps their licenses, if they stick their necks out.

''This is a very sensitive time for publishers,'' said a leading book editor who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ''They've received a lot of instructions from above saying to be careful about what books get printed. So if a book is publicly criticized, they don't know where it may lead and they don't want to take the risk.''

The Beijing house, which says it prints some 1,300 books a year, including more than 100 bought abroad, had a verbal agreement to secure the Chinese rights from Pantheon Books in New York, a division of Random House, for a negligible advance of $800, said Pantheon officials and Mr. Jin, who is a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta. It had already engaged a translator who was more than half finished when the nationalistic attack on the novel appeared on June 14. The essay was by a Beijing University literature professor with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Within a few days of that article, an editor informed Mr. Jin that the deal was off because the executives at the publishing house feared controversy, said Mr. Jin.

Whatever happened at the Beijing publisher -- its chief editor insisted in an interview today that the decision not to go ahead was routine business -- there had been earlier signs that China's culture czars were frowning.

There had been months of ominous silence in the Chinese media about the fairy tale success of Mr. Jin, 44, a onetime soldier who moved to the United States in 1985 received a Ph.D. in literature from Brandeis and writes in English, received the National Book Award for 1999 and this year's Pen/ Faulkner Award for ''Waiting,'' his second novel.

Some Chinese reporters told him that they had been ordered not to write about the book, said Mr. Jin, who is a United States citizen. This suggests that the near-universal shunning of the novel here by newspapers and on television was ordered by the Communist Party's powerful propaganda department, which controls all publications. Quite often, Chinese who find success overseas are subjects of fascination in Chinese newspapers and television programs.

Exactly why the novel should worry China's culture watchdogs is not obvious. Set in China over a recent two-decade period that includes Mao's Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, it portrays the emotional yearnings, paralysis and development of a military doctor who finds himself unable to divorce his peasant wife from his home village and, at the same time, sees the shriveling of love with the nurse he has promised one day to marry.

While Communist repression is the realistic backdrop, and certainly conditions the inner lives of the characters, the book is far less harsh in its portrayal of the Cultural Revolution than others that have been freely printed here.

But perhaps because it was printed abroad by a native of China -- one who chose not to return after the violent 1989 crackdown on democracy campaigners -- the acclaim in the United States appears to be stirring complex reactions among the relatively small group that even knows about it here.

''This book is not about politics,'' Mr. Jin said today in his own defense. ''It's about the human heart, about human flaws and the sinister nature of time.''

The June 14 essay, which was written by Liu Yiqing of Beijing University and appeared in the influential weekly Chinese Reading News, viciously attacks the motives of Mr. Jin, the American press and the critics who praised his work. Her essay treats the novel not as a work of literature but as, as she seems to feel, a disguised polemic.

To further his literary ambitions, Ms. Liu charges, Mr. Jin was forced ''to curse his own compatriots and to become a tool used by the American media to vilify China.''

Mr. Jin's depiction of an extremely rustic peasant wife with bound feet, Ms. Liu said, is an anachronism intended ''to emphasize the backwardness of China.'' The resistance of fellow villagers to his request for a divorce, she said, is meant to show that Chinese do not appreciate love.

Even the cover of the United States edition of the book, which features a single braid of hair down the length of the cover, is castigated. Ms. Liu said it was a male pigtail, a symbol of the feudal era, and that all the critics and newspapers who propelled ''Waiting'' toward big prizes did so not because of its supposedly elegant writing but because it met their goal of portraying the Chinese as ignorant and repressed.

The bound feet, he said, were present in the real-life story he heard years ago that inspired the novel. ''But anyway, this is a work of fiction,'' he said. ''The novel has its own logic, and it needs a character like her.''

As for the cover art, Mr. Jin said the artist intended to portray a woman's braid, in a layout evoking the passage of time and a hint of eroticism.

The Beijing book editor who spoke anonymously said that some Chinese intellectuals and officials had often reacted negatively to literary works by Chinese authors published overseas, recalling ''Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,'' a memoir by Jung Chang that won acclaim abroad but was attacked here and never published.

''It's like an anti-Western syndrome,'' Mr. Jin said. Such critics, he said, argue that overseas authors ''deserted their own country, and even wrote in a different language.''

In an interview today, the chief editor at Beijing Publishing Group, Long Jie, said it was a coincidence that the company had decided against publishing ''Waiting'' just after it was attacked in print here.

''We have the right to choose or not choose a book; this is a very normal thing,'' she said. ''Often we contact a foreign publisher, and if we feel the price is not reasonable then we won't sign.'' In this case, she added, there were ''many reasons'' for not proceeding.

Mr. Jin said that of the $800 payment, 25 percent would have gone to Random House.

Photo: Ha Jin, the author of ''Waiting,'' which won the National Book Award last year. (Jerry Bauer/Pantheon)